Samsung SCX-4200 review

Laser printers can be hulking beasts and multifunction devices aren't exactly small either, so you might expect a multifunction device based on a laser printer to be huge.

Samsung's SCX-4200 is, however, remarkably compact. Although it's a multifunction device that can scan in colour and make black and white prints and copies, it's little bigger than some inkjet printers we've seen.

Setting up the SCX-4200 is simple enough and involves little more than giving its toner cartridge a gentle shake before you insert it. Samsung's setup program and the print and scan drivers that it installs ,are very easy to use. Up to 250 sheets of plain paper can be stored in the cassette that slots into the bottom of the device.

Printed pages emerge in the narrow slot beneath the SCX-4200's scan bed. There's enough room here for print jobs of a few pages and the scanner pivots up on rear hinges to make room for longer jobs of up to 60 pages. This odd arrangement helps to keep the Samsung compact, but you need to mind your fingers when releasing the catch, which holds the scan bed in its raised position.

As you might expect from a laser printer, the SCX-4200 prints crisp black text. It makes an impressive job of graphics too and reproduces photographs well with grey shades. However, close inspection of grey text and graphics shows up the dots the printer uses to create these shades and our test prints suffered from a thin white stripe down their length.

Images we captured using the SCX-4200's scanner were sharply focused. Colours were faithful to original documents, but the scanner couldn't distinguish between similar light shades. Scan quality was good enough for business use but not for artistic of photograhic purposes. Each photocopy took just 10.5 seconds to complete, but disappointingly the results were far darker than the original document.

Author: Simon Handby